“Jaia eta borroka”: Political ethnographies of cultural activism amidst a context of illegalization in the basque country

In this paper I will discuss the professional and personal challenges I have faced during a two-year ethnographic study in the Basque Country. I will focus on the methodological decisions I have made “on the ground” to adapt my dissertation’s methodological design, the negotiation of my access to the field, the effects of the relationships I established with my subjects of study, and the personal implications derived from an investigation conducted in a context of fierce political opposition and illegalization. My project studies the interaction between culture and politics in the Basque public space from both a relational and historical-comparative perspective. I do so by focusing on Bilbao’s annual popular festivity (Aste Nagusia, AN) since its birth in 1978 to the present. AN constitutes a major long-term experiment of what I call “participatory culture;” it involves networks of state institutions, political parties, entrepreneur associations, and also a group of social movement organizations and cultural collectives affiliated to a Federation of Comparsas. As such, it represents the sole “cultural space” where actors with center-, right-, and left-wing ideologies, and with Spanish unionist and Basque nationalist tendencies meet, and collide, in Spain. My paper will build on ethnographic observations gathered between 2009 and 2010, two critical years for my research. During this period, the state-led repression and criminalization of the abertzale Left –the hub of socialist and independentist organizations linked to the Basque armed group ETA– finally reached Bilbao’s festive field. 2009 was, too, the year in which the abertzales launched an internal process of “democratization” aimed at putting an end to 50 years of armed struggle and their 8-year electoral proscription, finally achieved in 2011. Given that almost half of the comparsas in the Federation fall within the abertzale umbrella, this has been a pivotal period to conduct my investigation.